One of her dogs disappeared after a car wreck. After a frantic 8-day search, here’s what happened.
A nurse with a
What happened next happened very quickly -- and it had profound emotional ramifications for the 26-year-old nurse.
The fatigued Fadul woke up behind the wheel just before she was able to direct her spinning vehicle into a interstate guardrail instead of opposing traffic.
In the seconds immediately afterward, amid the smoke and powder of exploding airbags, she took stock -- and found that two of her three dogs with whom she had been traveling were missing from her wrecked car.
"I thought, 'Oh my god, the dogs,'" she told this news outlet in a phone interview Saturday.
A passing motorist stopping to help her was able to find one of the missing dogs, named Will.
But a second -- Roxy -- remained missing.
For eight days, Fadul and friends endlessly searched the area for Roxy, leaving fliers on the doors of area homes, hiking through woods, working social media, driving regional roads.
According to an account on the SWVA Today website, area farmers allowed Fadul to search on private property where hills gave her a good vantage point to scan surrounding countryside.
"We got up every morning at
Almost immediately after the accident, Fadul shared her story, with photos, on Facebook, which strangers and newfound friends shared some 7,000 times, distributing photos of lost Roxy.
"Blessed to be alive with small cuts and bruises but I feel dead... I'd rather (have) physical pain over emotional pain any day," she wrote in a
Eight days later, Fadul's blend of good luck and hard work paid off.
When a passing motorist traveling from
"She said, 'I saw Roxy. I'll tell you where I saw her,'" Fadul recalled.
Fadul responded nearly right away. She searched the area, to no immediate avail.
"Of course, I get there," she said. "And there's no sighting of my dog."
Discouraged and weary, she decided to distribute a few more flyers in the area where Roxy had been spotted Thursday morning. She had been missing work, and she knew that she couldn't stay in
"I had 20 flyers left, I'm going to put flyers by the houses," she told herself.
That Thursday morning, after the most recent sighting, she stopped by two homes she had not yet visited, parked her car and started leaving flyers on door handles.
Nearby, she thought she heard a small animal walking on some pebbles.
When she turned, Roxy was there, behind her, "staring at me."
Said Fadul: "I thought my mind was playing tricks."
As she told this news outlet: "I see her moving and wagging her tail, and I was like, 'You have to be kidding me.'"
Roxy jumped into her arms and started licking her, she said.
"I couldn't even cry," Fadul said. "I had cried so much over the past few days, I felt like there were no more tears."
The reunion happened barely two miles from the site of the interstate accident.
Fadul was beyond happy. Her dogs go with her when she travels for work.
"My dogs are my family, and they come with me. Those dogs are my babies, you know?" she said.
In the past 48 hours, Fadul had Roxy checked out by a veterinarian at Med-Vet in
Fadul is still working at Good Samaritan and has signed for three more weeks until the hospital closes.
But the important thing is: Her family is once again intact.
"I've got my baby," Fadul said. "I keep telling people, Roxy found me."
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